Edwin Flataunet, Founder of Altpocket.io

Who are you?

I have been programming since I was about 10 years old when I made my first website and programming has since then programming has been my hobby.

I have always dreamed about running a successful website, I have tried everything from forums to blogs to e-learning platforms and now to this financial tool which I like to call my breakthrough.

Can you tell us the story of your business from idea to where you are now?

The thing that is so fantastic about Altpocket is that I actually never thought I would be doing something like this.

Before Altpocket I ran a swedish E-Learning platform that I had been developing for around 7 months together with my co-founder at Altpocket, after we finished development and we decided to do an official release we were expecting to get thousands of users and an alright income right from the start.

However when we launched it we only got 300 users in total the following 2 weeks.

While this was happening I received $400 in bitcoins from a service I did and had two options, either I buy pizza for it and other useless things or I could try and get into cryptocurrency investing.

I chose the second option and started investing, while I noticed my net worth was going up I was looking for some kind of platform to track my investments in a better way than the exchanges does, I tried a few out but nothing really had what I wanted in a platform.

That’s when I decided I would make my own platform for fun and to learn even more, I used the knowledge I got from the past 7 months of developing the E-Learning platform and after only 4 days I had finished my MVP.

I showed it to some friends I had that were into investing aswell and received great feedback so I decided I would post it on a forum I usually discussed cryptocurrencies on.

The feedback from the forum was amazing and the amount of registrations made really exceeded my expectations.

In just a few days I had gotten as many users as we got on out previous platform in 7 months.

As this was happening we had already decided to shut down our E-Learning platform and continue with this, we were currently located at a local incubator which was really impressed with what I had created in such a small time so they let us stay and continue with Altpocket.

As of today we have around 15,000 users and an active community around it, we also have a support team of 5 people that helps us answer questions, a bot developer and 2 trial developers joining us soon.

What has been your biggest failure or struggle?

The biggest struggle with Altpocket I have had recently is to scale it to the amount of users we have and are receiving.
Altpocket started as a fun project for myself, I had just started investing into cryptocurrencies and decided to post Altpocket on a forum and from then it has blew up.

I expected maybe 5-10 users or something but it spread like a wildfire and since then we have gained around 15,000 users.

With that said, Altpocket was built to handle just me and I never thought about making it scalable with a larger userbase, so as time went on I noticed that the site was getting slow no matter how good server I had.

So I would say that was my biggest struggle, scaling it to a larger userbase because I have never built an application like this before nor had a userbase like this.

Another failure we had at Altpocket which we learned from is from using outsourced APIs, we used an API to get historical prices of cryptocurrencies and one day they blocked us which made the whole site malfunction.

But we learned from our mistakes and now both have been solved and the site is running really well.

And what has been your biggest achievement or success?

My biggest achivement is definently Altpocket as whole, it feels wonderful to create something by myself and see it grow to what it is today.

Altpocket started as a fun project to learn from and I never expected the amount of users we have today or the wonderful community around it, I am really grateful for it.

I see people offering help with development, mobile app, design, donations and more and it makes me really happy and motivated to continue.

What’s your must read business book?

I’m going to have to pass this question, I haven’t read any business books yet as I am developing most of the time.
However I would love to read some but I just don’t have the time, if I were to choose what to read first it would be one of Warren Buffets books as I have heard great things about them.

Who’s your most inspirational CEO or founder?

Well I would say Mark Zuckerberg, he built up facebook alongside many other things and Facebook has done so many amazing frameworks for web developers.

Altpocket is also a kind of social platform that has a few aspects like facebook does but it is niched to cryptocurrencies.

Other than that I look up to my parents as they have ran their own company for many years, I think if they wouldn’t have been founders I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to do something of my own as well.

And can you tell us something weird or interesting about yourself?

I’m a super fan of League Of Legends, I love playing the game because it takes a lot of talent to become good, I also love the E-Sports dedicated to it.